China blocks access to New York Times Web site

What happened to greater freedom and democracy for giving China the Olympics? I’m not hearing any good about human rights or democracy coming out China! All I see are questionable products tainted with poison in our food and toys being shipped to America.

China blocks access to New York Times Web site
China has blocked access to the New York Times Web site, the newspaper said Saturday, days after the central government defended its right to censor online content it deems illegal.

Computer users who logged on in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou received a message that the site was not available when they tried to connect on Friday morning, the paper said. Some users were cut of as early as Thursday evening, it said.

The Web site remained inaccessible from Beijing Saturday.

It was not clear if the move was meant to block specific content on the newspaper’s Web site or if it was a return to stricter censorship of the Internet in general. Beijing loosened some media and Internet controls during the 2008 Summer Olympics – gestures that were meant to show the international community that the games had brought greater freedom to the Chinese people.

A spokesman for the Foreign Ministry said they do not deal with Web sites. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, which regulates the Internet, could not be reached for comment.

Earlier this week, Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao defended China’s right to censor Web sites that have material deemed illegal by the government, saying that other countries regulate Internet usage too.

During the August games, China allowed access to long-barred Web sites such as the British Broadcasting Corp. and Human Rights Watch after an outcry from foreign reporters who complained that Beijing was failing to live up to its pledges of greater media freedom.

The New York Times said Beijing had blocked the Chinese-language Web site of the BBC, and Web sites of Voice of America, Asiaweek, and Ming Pao, a Hong Kong newspaper, earlier in the week. But apart from Ming Pao the sites were all accessible Friday, it said.

Ming Pao’s online site was still inaccessible Saturday in Beijing.

China has the most online users in the world with more than 250 million, but it has also put in place a sophisticated system to police Web sites for sensitive material and routinely blocks sites that support Tibetan independence or the region’s spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.

A spokeswoman for The Times, Catherine J. Mathis, told the paper that there did not appear to be a technical issue. Users in Japan, Hong Kong, and the U.S. were also not experiencing difficulties, the paper said.

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Octogenarian Tibetan Sentenced to 7 Years’ Imprisonment

China is still at it, all while the world turns away. They had their Summer Olympics, but China has not honored its alleged commitment for greater civil rights of the Tibetan people.

How does a country destroy a people and its culture? They destroy it by imprisoning or killing its traditional practitioners of that culture. When the teacher is gone, then the students cannot learn their traditional ways.

China uses some trumped up charge and “splitist” theory to imprison Tibetan teachers. What did Norbu do? He’s a traditional printer!

Octogenarian Tibetan Sentenced to 7 Years’ Imprisonment
The international community should protest the imprisonment and secret sentencing of Paljor Norbu, an 81-year-old Tibetan traditional printer, and seek his immediate exoneration and unconditional release, Human Rights Watch said yesterday.

According to HRW, Norbu was taken by the police from his home in Lhasa on October 31, 2008, on suspicion that he had printed “prohibited material,” including the banned Tibetan flag. During his detention, judicial authorities refused to inform his relatives that he was being detained, or to reveal the charges against him, HRW said on its website. “He was tried in secret in November and sentenced to seven years in prison. A letter informing his family of the sentence was then hand-delivered to them. His current whereabouts are unknown.”

“Just about any material on Tibet that lacks the Chinese Communist Party’s explicit blessing is ‘prohibited material,’” said Sophie Richardson, Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. “But no one should be jailed for printing flags, books, or pictures just because a government would prefer to suppress those ideas – that’s why freedom of expression is a basic right.”

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